MenSat III

[DudiousMax at aol.com]

Continuing p. 310:

                 The short form of the Menippean satire is usually a dialogue 
or colloquy, in which the dramatic interest is in a conflict of ideas rather 
than of character.  This is the favorite form of Erasmus, and is common in 
Voltaire.  Here again the form is not invariably satiric in attitude, but 
shades off into more purely fanciful or moral discussions, like the 
_Imaginary Conversations_ of Landor or the "dialogue of the dead."  Sometimes 
this form expands to full length, and more than two speakers are used: the 
setting then is usually a _cena_ or symposium, like the one that looms so 
large in Petronius.  Plato, though much earlier in the field than Menippus, 
is a strong influence on this type, which stretches in an unbroken tradition 
down through those urbane and leisurely conversations which define the ideal 
courtier in Castiglione, or the doctrine and discipline of angling in Walton. 
 A modern development produces the country-house weekends in Peacock, Huxley, 
and their imitators in which the opinions and ideas and cultural interests 
expressed are as important as the love-making.
                The novelist shows his exuberance either by an exhaustive 
analysis of human relationships, as in Henry James, or of social phenomena, 
as in Tolstoy.  The Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and 
attitudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an 
enormous mass of erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic 
targets with an avalanche of their own jargon.  A species, or rather 
sub-species, of the forms the kind of encyclopaedic farrago represented by 
Athenaeus' _Deipnosophists_ and Macrobius' _Saturnalia_, where people sit at 
a banquet and pour out a vast mass of erudition on every subject that might 
conceivably come up in conversation.  The display of erudition had probably 
been associated with the Menippean tradition by Varro, who was enough of a 
polymath to make Quintilian, if not stare and gasp, at any rate call him _vir 
Romanorum eruditissimus_.  The tendency to expand into an encyclopaedic 
farrago is clearly marked in Rabelais, notably in the great catalogues of 
torcheculs and epithets of codpieces and methods of divination.  The 
encyclopaedic compilations produced in the line of duty by Erasmus and 
Voltaire suggest that a magpie instinct to collect facts is not unrelated to 
the type of ability that has made them famous as artists.  Flaubert's 
encyclopaedic approach to the construction of _Bouvard et Pecuchet_ is quite 
comprehensible if we explain it as marking an affinity with the Menippean 
tradition.